The Night Spinner

by Abi Elphinstone

  The humpback bridge had completely disappeared and Moll gulped as the realisation crept in: they were cut off from the mainland now. She turned back to the door and, just as she was about to knock a third time, somebody screamed. Moll’s head jerked up towards the window where the sound had come from and there was Siddy, at last, but his face was white with terror. And through the glass Moll heard his muffled voice.

  ‘It’s a trick, Moll!’ he shouted. ‘Get away from here! Run!’

  The window was darkened suddenly by a whirl of grey cloak and then Siddy was gone. Moll reached behind her for an arrow and it was only then that she discovered it wasn’t just Bruce and the bridge that had vanished.

  The golden feather was gone too.

  Panic tore through Moll. Had the feather fallen out on the moors? Or had Bruce stolen it when her back was turned in the cart? Moll thought of her quest in Kittlerumpit’s lair, now all for nothing, then she pinched her leg to stop her thoughts spiralling. She needed a plan. She had to work out how to hold everything together – to free Siddy and find the feather – because she wouldn’t leave her friend again, no matter what he said.

  ‘What do we do now, Gryff?’ she asked.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, the wildcat prowled towards the door and, quite of its own accord, it groaned on its hinges, then creaked open before him. No one appeared from behind it, as if the castle itself was inviting them in. And, with an arrow set to her bow, Moll breathed in a lungful of courage and stepped over the threshold with Gryff.

  They glanced around the stone hallway. It was empty and unlit, but a sliver of sunlight spilled through the door, glinting off the crossed swords fixed to the walls and casting a path towards an opening ahead. But the passageway beyond wasn’t marked by a door, as Moll had expected. Stretching the height of the hallway was a huge face carved into the stone. The eyes were filled with jet-black jewels and as Moll edged closer she could have sworn she saw them swivelling in their sockets, following her every move. What frightened Moll most, though, was the enormous mouth hanging open in a silent scream. The only way on into the castle was through the middle of that gaping mouth . . .

  Moll reached for Gryff and thought of Siddy and the golden feather and all that needed to happen to beat the Shadowmasks once and for all. Then together they stepped through the mouth. In front of them was a staircase which spiralled upwards into the gloom and they began to climb it, glancing every now and again through the latticed windows at the grey sea beyond. Moll placed a hand on the wall and grimaced. The stones were coated in cobwebs, soft and sticky, and they draped across the walls like the skin of a ghost. Tucking her elbows in and raising her bow still higher, Moll carried on climbing.

  Then the shouting began.

  ‘No! Get away from me!’

  It was Siddy. Moll and Gryff raced up the staircase towards the sound, winding round and round, before charging off the final step and bursting into a large room. Hundreds of shelves lined the walls from the floor right up to the ceiling and each one was cluttered with different-sized glass bottles. Some were small and curved with long necks while others were rectangular with cork stoppers – and every bottle was filled with liquid: ivy greens, candlewax reds, sapphire blues, burning yellows. A long, wooden table stretched the length of the room and on it were candelabra sagging with cobwebs. Above them, hanging from the roof, was an enormous chandelier made entirely of antlers, and inside that, bound in a giant cobweb, was Siddy.

  Moll rushed towards him. ‘Sid!’ she yelled. ‘Oh, Sid!’

  He wriggled his body round inside the antlers, only his head free from the shroud of cobwebs.

  ‘Moll,’ he said quietly. ‘I told you to run away.’

  ‘I couldn’t leave you, Sid. No matter what you said.’

  Siddy smiled and Moll noticed a tear trickle off his chin.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said a voice from the far end of the room.

  Moll turned round and readied her bow, but what she saw was not a terror of leathery wings or a mask with a forked tongue, as she’d encountered a few weeks ago down by the sea. On a balcony was a throne coated in spiderwebs and on it sat a very old woman. She was hunched over as if time had bent her closer to the grave, and her grey robes were covered in dust. Instead of skin on her face, cobwebs stretched over her cheekbones, sucked into empty pockets where eyes and a mouth should have been. Immediately, Moll knew this was a Shadowmask, not the kindly Mrs Grey that Bruce had invented.

  The witch doctor tilted her head towards Moll and the bones in her neck cricked. ‘And so you have come at last, Molly Pecksniff.’ Her voice was a rasp, as if there were only a few words left inside her.

  Moll noticed Bruce kneeling by her side, his head bowed low and the golden feather at his feet.

  ‘You lied to me,’ she snarled.

  Gryff pounded his paws against the flagstones and hissed, but, when Bruce lifted his head, his eyes were dark and afraid.

  ‘Orbrot, she – she made me,’ he stammered.

  The Shadowmask stood up. ‘Skull, Hemlock, Ashtongue, Darkebite and now me, Orbrot . . .’

  Moll’s insides clenched as she thought of the sinister pattern the first letter of each of the witch doctors’ names spelt: SHADO. The word was almost complete.

  Orbrot went on. ‘I am the fifth Shadowmask. I—’

  But Moll didn’t wait for any more. She thought of the fight inside her and willed on her impossible dream, then she drew her bow back and fired. The arrow sailed through the hall, but Orbrot leapt aside just in time and the arrow struck the far wall and clanged to the ground.

  Orbrot reached down and snapped the arrow in half. ‘That’s not a very polite way to begin now, is it?’

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Moll!’ Siddy cried. ‘She’ll try to make you feel weak and useless, but you’re not. I know you’re not!’

  Moll watched in horror as the cobwebs tightened round her friend, fixing him still.

  ‘Free Siddy and hand over the golden feather,’ Moll said, ‘or I’ll fire again and this time I won’t miss.’

  Orbrot let the broken arrow clatter to the stone floor, then she shrugged and walked very slowly down a flight of steps. Her cloak rustled like old felt as she crossed the flagstones and paused at the other end of the long, wooden table.

  ‘Arrows, words, catapults, fists.’ She laughed but the sound was hollow, like a dead man’s call. ‘None of those are going to help you now.’

  Moll raised her bow again, but her insides quaked with dread. How many times were her arrows going to fall short? Where was the fight inside her that Aira had been so sure of? The strength that Siddy thought she had? Even Gryff was edging to hide behind her now. It was as if the fifth Shadowmask had some unseen power that drained them both of courage.

  Orbrot wrapped her wrinkled fingers round the back of a chair. ‘You see these bottles all around us, Molly?’

  Moll scanned the cluttered shelves.

  ‘Ignore her, Moll!’ Siddy gasped, trying to break free from the webs that held him. ‘Block your ears—’

  The cobwebs crept over Siddy’s mouth and gagged the rest of his words. Moll tightened the grip on her bow and raised it to her eye to focus on Orbrot, but with every word the Shadowmask muttered she felt her courage wane.

  ‘These bottles are filled with your hopes and dreams, Molly.’

  Gryff whimpered and then cowered beneath the table as Orbrot continued.

  ‘Your connection with the Bone Murmur has meant that I have been able to steal them without you noticing.’ She paused. ‘I couldn’t tap into your wildcat, though – a predator like him is too hard to penetrate from afar – but, now that I have him here in Greystone, I see my words are having quite the desired effect.’

  Moll’s thoughts crashed down as realisation dawned. It had been little seeds of doubt at first – worrying that the quest was too big for her in the Clattering Gorge, feeling her search for Sid was hopeless while saddling Pepper outside Fillie Crankie, being unab
le to let Aira’s words of comfort in as they rode to Whuppity Cairns and watching her arrows fall short against the peatbogger. Then the worries had grown: the overwhelming guilt at losing Alfie and Sid, her despair in Kittlerumpit’s tunnels and her fear of the wilderness around her in the bothy the night before. There had been a reason why Moll hadn’t felt like herself in the north. Orbrot had been stealing her hopes and dreams; she had been slowly draining Moll’s fight.

  The Shadowmask walked over to the shelf nearest Moll and, as her hands crawled out of her cloak, Moll noticed her nails. She shivered. They were long and brown, curling under each fingertip like sharp, rusted hooks, and Orbrot let them clink against the bottles as she walked past.

  ‘Each bottle contains a thought you’ve had, Molly – a pointless little thought for your friends or for your quest to save the old magic.’

  The witch doctor stopped for a moment beside a square bottle with a glass stopper that held a dark purple liquid, ‘What have we here? A token thought for Domino – a little wish that he’ll be on the mend soon?’ Orbrot moved on to the next bottle. ‘A spot of homesickness in this one, I think.’ Her cobwebbed mask tilted towards Moll. ‘Aw, missing Oak and Mooshie, were we?’

  Moll edged back towards the spiral staircase, her bow now limp by her side, and beneath the table Gryff began to shake.

  Orbrot stalked on to the next bottle. ‘A plea for your precious Gryff trapped inside Kittlerumpit’s cage,’ she sneered. ‘How sweet. Oh, and a prayer for Siddy whom you abandoned on the moors, whom you scorned for being useless and whom you laughed at on top of a train with Domino. Not much of a friend, are you?’

  Moll shook her head at the chandelier that held Siddy. ‘It wasn’t like that, Sid. You know that, don’t you?’

  But the cobwebs had bound Siddy tight and he could only blink frightened eyes at her.

  ‘You may have relied on bows and arrows and catapults before,’ Orbrot muttered, ‘but they count for nothing in the face of a Mind Warper.’ She crossed the room towards Moll. ‘I can break into your thoughts, Molly. I can lift every hope you have right out of your body.’

  Moll inched behind the table, but still Orbrot followed, her robes shuffling over the flagstones after her.

  ‘Every hope you’ve had since coming to the northern wilderness I’ve taken.’

  Gryff cowered by Moll’s legs, making soft moaning sounds, and, as Moll looked up at Orbrot’s cobwebbed mask gliding towards her, she felt the hopes she’d had outside Greystone – of being reunited with Siddy and finding the last amulet – drain from her chest. She stood, trembling, at the end of the table.

  Orbrot stopped suddenly. ‘There was one hope I didn’t manage to steal.’ Her voice had a bite to it now and the cobwebs pulled taut across her face, sinking about the eyes and darkening into the holes. ‘Somehow you managed to cling on to this sorry little thought.’

  Moll’s mind raced. What hope of hers had been strong enough to withstand the Mind Warper’s curses?

  ‘Just like Kittlerumpit, I’ll offer you a trade,’ Orbrot sneered. ‘I’ll free Siddy, and give you back your golden feather, if you’ll hand me the dream I crave.’

  Then Moll remembered the goblin’s words to Aira in Whuppity Cairns: the Shadowmasks . . . said they needed to break her impossible dream to conjure their eternal night.

  Orbrot’s mask tilted to one side and Moll could almost see her anger pulsing behind the cobwebs. ‘All of this can be over if you hand me your impossible dream.’ She steepled her fingers in front of her robes, her nails bent round like a vulture’s talons. ‘You admitted your other fears, Moll. You said them out loud. Now it’s time to admit this one. Give up your hope of finding Alfie again, of making him real. Just say the words – I give you Alfie – and I’ll free Siddy from my web and hand over the feather.’

  Moll felt the words Orbrot wanted hovering on her tongue. It would be so easy. Just four words and she would have Sid back and the feather they needed to find the last amulet. And yet something inside her quavered at the thought of giving up her impossible dream, the one she whispered before bed every night, the one she clung to when almost everything else was falling apart. And she couldn’t help but wonder what it was about Alfie – or her memory of him – that Orbrot needed. Alfie had been tied up in Shadowmasks’ magic from the start – they’d used him to create their Soul Splinter – so what if they needed to use him again in their plans for an everlasting darkness?

  The Shadowmask stepped close to Moll and she could see each cobwebbed filament coiled round the woman’s neck and smell the stale tang that seeped from her mouth. A spider crept between the folds of her robes and Moll shrank back with Gryff.

  ‘You clung on stubbornly in Kittlerumpit’s tunnels,’ Orbrot said. ‘You chose the old magic over Alfie because you believed – because you hoped – that it would help you find him again. But your impossible dream has always been too far out of reach. Alfie’s in the Underworld now – in a place you cannot follow him to. He’s gone, Molly. You let him die when you forced him to destroy the Soul Splinter.’

  Moll let the poison of the Shadowmask’s words drip inside her. No one had admitted that Alfie might be gone for ever, that maybe it was all her fault. Her nightmares had been full of this awful possibility, but none of her friends had voiced the darkest whispers of her dreams. And yet, if Alfie was dead, why had she felt so sure that she had seen him in her mind in Kittlerumpit’s tunnels . . .?

  ‘Let him go, Molly,’ Orbrot muttered. ‘You killed him because of your obsession with the old magic, a magic that is all but lost now. Alfie might still be alive had it not been for your selfishness, your quest for glory, but now he is locked forever in the darkness of the Underworld – and you cannot help a boy who is already dead.’

  Moll could hear Siddy struggling inside the chandelier, groaning beneath the spiderweb gag, but her eyes were glued to the shelves, to all her hopes and dreams trapped in Orbrot’s bottles. And, as she looked at them, she felt an emptiness swell inside her, a hole opening somewhere close to her heart where she stored her impossible dream.

  Her bow dropped to the ground and she fell to her knees and clung to Gryff. Then she closed her eyes and thought of Alfie and their last few days together: of how he had rescued her from Ashtongue’s trap and followed her out over the sea to destroy Darkebite and the Soul Splinter – of his own accord. Moll shook her head. Orbrot hadn’t been there on the eagle’s back with Alfie. She hadn’t heard Moll’s promise to him: that she’d follow her friend wherever he went and whatever the Shadowmasks had in store for them. And she hadn’t seen Moll weep as Alfie disappeared. She didn’t know the real story . . .

  And, once again, as Moll thought of her friend with her eyes clamped shut, an image of Alfie hardened inside her mind into something so real she felt that if she rushed forward and reached out her arms he would be there inside them. Moll kept absolutely still and, in the emptiness of her closed eyes, she watched Alfie walk towards her through a swirl of shadows. And then he stopped, his scruffy blonde hair and bright blue eyes so close that Moll could almost feel his breath on her cheeks. The shadows rose up suddenly and, as Alfie raised his arms towards Moll, she felt her own arms stretching out – two souls searching for each other in the dark – then the pitchblack thickened, drowning Alfie out, and though Moll’s heart beat with panic as she watched her friend disappear, she knew without a trace of doubt that Alfie was still in her world and she would never give up her impossible dream.

  Moll didn’t dare open her eyes to look at Orbrot – all that waited for her there were fear and loathing. Instead, she crouched close to the surest thing she knew, to Gryff, whose love and loyalty had roots deeper than the hatred that throbbed around them. She listened to the wildcat’s heartbeats clamouring against her own, drowning the sound of the Shadowmask calling her name, and, slowly and cautiously, Moll dared to hope again as Alfie had in the face of the Soul Splinter. She felt Gryff’s strength build up inside her, stronger than Orbrot�
�s words, stronger even than the Night Spinner and his Veil, and with it came an idea. It was a small idea, and full of risk, but the hope inside it flickered like fire. Moll opened her eyes and stood up.

  ‘You’re going to give Alfie up in exchange for the golden feather, aren’t you?’ Orbrot said.

  Moll nodded and the Shadowmask clasped her crooked hands in delight.

  ‘A wise choice, Molly. No point in chasing dying dreams.’ She looked at Gryff who was sitting beside Moll, his green eyes sparkling. ‘It seems even your cat agrees.’

  Moll took a step towards Orbrot, then, to the witch doctor’s surprise, Moll began to walk in a circle around her.

  ‘You stole my parents from me,’ Moll said quietly as she circled the Shadowmask again. There was a tremor to her voice, but she pushed it down.

  Orbrot nodded. ‘Many will die as the dark magic is forged.’

  Moll carried on walking, around and around. ‘Your curses wounded Oak and they blinded Gryff.’

  Orbrot nodded. ‘A small price to pay for our powers to rise.’ Her cloak twitched. ‘Are you ready to surrender your impossible dream now?’

  Moll didn’t answer. She kept circling Orbrot and, though the Shadowmask couldn’t see it because the room was so gloomy, Moll made sure that with each step she took she unravelled a little more of the near-invisible piano string from her pocket. It wound loosely round Orbrot’s cloak and every time it did so Moll felt the hope inside her grow.

  From the balcony, a side door opened and Bruce slipped from the room, but Moll was bent on her plan now and she saw nothing of his sly disappearance.

  ‘The Night Spinner and his Veil poisoned my friends, Domino and Angus,’ Moll said.

  She was walking faster now, her voice strong like steel and her eyes fierce, and from the far end of the room a bottle on one of Orbrot’s shelves cracked and the blue liquid inside it vanished. Orbrot was so intent on Moll giving up her impossible dream that she didn’t notice, but Moll heard the sound and with it her courage grew.

  ‘Your dark magic conjured creatures that attacked me: peatboggers and witches in the north, owls and kelpies down by the sea.’